22.6.14

JERRY GOFFIN (1939 - 2014)

Elsewhere on Just Backdated I eulogise about the song ‘Will You Love
Me Tomorrow’ which has been a favourite of mine for as long as I’ve known the
difference between 33⅓ and 45. But like many over the years I made the
mistake of crediting it solely to Carole King when I should have said it was a
written by both Carole and her then husband (and lyricist) Gerry Goffin and if
I could I’d like to make a belated apology to Gerry but I can’t because, sadly,
he died on Thursday.

On Friday night in the
Compasses this was duly noted when Becky Clowes, daughter of Alun Davies and
one half of their duo Good Men In The Jungle, sang a truly inspired version of
‘Love Me Tomorrow’ a capella because Alun didn’t know the chords, bringing the
house down in the process. It was, she told me afterwards, one of her
favourites too and the passion with which Becky sang it left me in no doubt
about this. I was spellbound for a couple of minutes and almost choked on my
pint of Guinness.

I could have told Alun
the chords (in the key of C, a blend of C, F, G, Em and Am, with a C7 to launch the middle-eight and a D7 to finish it) because back in the sixties Sandra & The Montanas, a
group for whom I once played guitar, used to perform ‘Will You Love Me
Tomorrow’, as noted in my other post. Sandra was pretty good too but nowhere
near as good as The Shirelles who add the sense of longing that comes only from
a teenage girl whose eye has been turned by a handsome lad.

Gerry Goffin wrote the
words to many more greats, including another of my favourites, ‘Goin’ Back’,
recordings of which I have by The Byrds, Nils Lofgren and Dusty Springfield. A
sort of À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu kind of song, its lyrics
always make me stop and think, not just about my own past but about what a
lovely melody Carole fashioned for Gerry’s lyric. I’d say Dusty’s version wins
in a photo finish with McGuinn’s men, but The Byrds were cheating a bit because they got Jim Gordon to play the drums and they altered the words to make it sound more
‘masculine’. All the same, David Crosby, fool that he is, hated it.

Other
songs with words by Gerry Goffin include ‘Up On The Roof’ by The Drifters
(1963), which magically creates a world of tranquility to be found in the midst
of the bustling city merely by climbing the stairs to where ‘the stars put on a
show for free’. Then there was ‘Chains’, like ‘...Tomorrow’ for The Shirelles
but covered by The Beatles on their first LP; ‘Halfway To Paradise’, Billy
Fury’s greatest hit; ‘The Locomotion’ for Little Eva and, later, Kylie Minogue;
‘One Fine Day’ for The Chiffons; ‘Oh No Not My Baby’ which was a hit for
Manfred Mann; and a slew of others too numerous to mention. Most of these songs
were written for black American artists and crossed the Atlantic to be recorded
by white Brits, which reflects Gerry and Carole’s impressive ability to cross
the colour divide in their work.

To
have written any one of these would have been an achievement in itself, to have
written them all demands enormous respect.